Overview o New England Coastal Flood Study Methodology

This paper presents an overview of the development of methologies used to determine the probabilistic flood levels for New England coastal flood insurance studies. The Federal Insurance Administration (FIA) sponsored the development of a methodology which would be used in a synthetic winter storm model and a two-dimensional storm surge model for the calculation of coastal flood levels. Based on this methodology, determinations can be made of the coastal flood levels having return intervals of 10, 50, 100, and 500 years for inclusion in flood insurance studies. To achieve the flood insurance study goals for the New England coastal states, the following tasks were performed: the simulation of wind and pressure fields of northeasters and hurricanes, the determination of coastal storm surge and storm tide elevations, the statistical analysis of storm tide elevations, and the calculation of wave runup associated with storm tides.